Mediastreet
Tag

Social Media Strategies

Browsing
In News

Unlocking the power of generative AI to improve paid social media strategies

No Comments

By Josh Dorward

Generative AI tools promise to solve digital marketers’ creative challenges, but they fall short on brand consistency and quality, says Josh Dorward (general manager, Creative Automation). Here’s the missing piece of the puzzle.

Imagine that you’re a digital marketer responsible for managing paid media across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.

Chances are that at least three of your hair-on-fire problems boil down to not having the video and image assets that you need, on time, at scale.

  • Ad fatigue: The dropoff in performance (and the related increase in cost per result) when your audience has been overexposed to the same creative. This is primarily driven by a shortage of fresh campaign creative. (Meta’s guidance on combating ad fatigue: “Create a new ad with a new video or image that is materially different from the original creative.”)
  • A/B testing limitations: A/B testing is wildly popular – with 77% of companies reporting running A/B tests on their homepages. But it’s less common to see robust A/B testing in digital advertising – with ads missing from the list of most common A/B testing domains (website, landing page, email, and search). That’s because ads are significantly more resource-intensive, as they require tens–if not hundreds–of alternative video and image assets to properly test everything from calls-to-action and headlines to product displays and vfx overlays.
  • Personalization challenges: Every digital marketer dreams about delivering perfectly tailored ads based on everything from the local weather to a user’s next-best action. But it can be time-consuming and impractical to create multiple versions of a creative asset for each granular audience segment.

So, you’re under the gun to deliver ROAS and can’t magically multiply your creative team.

What can you do?

Where generative AI soars – and where it falls short

Generative AI (genAI) tools – like Dall-E and Midjourney – promise to transport digital marketers to a paradise free of creative bottlenecks. (Check out this article for a breathless review of the march of progress and some cool inspiration.)

Here’s the premise: instead of requiring costly photoshoots and dedicated design work, what if genAI tools could enable marketers to automatically specify every element of their ideal digital ad?

Want to alter the look of your model based on the demographic of a customer segment? Easy. Change the background of your photoshoot based on the weather conditions across 50 local markets? Nothing simpler.

It’s a great vision. The problem is that, well, it doesn’t work all that well. (Yet.)

As recapped here, generative AI tools tend to struggle with brand consistency (e.g., making sure that images match your e-commerce brand’s winky, irreverent personality) and quality control (e.g., making sure that all humans have five fingers).

It’s clear that there’s a missing piece in the creative stack for marketers to truly take over.

Marketers need creative “connective tissue”

Digital marketers need a new type of technology to help connect the raw potential of genAI platforms with the practical constraints and needs of digital advertising platforms.

Think of it as creative connective tissue. The translation layer between raw creative assets – whether it’s manually-shot photos or genAI-produced imagery – and the specific requirements for scaling on-brand imagery for digital advertising. The glue that brings together your brand’s creative DNA (look and feel) and the specific requirements (size, resolution, etc.) of your ad platforms.

Platforms like Creative Automation – the latest offering from image and video leader Cloudinary – exist to transform output from generative AI platforms into immediately useful digital ads at massive scale. Creative Automation takes your favourite design and maps each element to a spreadsheet, leaving marketers and creatives to simply add new data rows to quickly generate your new design variations. In the process it offers digital marketers:

  • Brand control: Full control over design elements in templates created in popular Adobe design tools, and the power to determine its placement, size, animation style, and final appearance without dragging and dropping for every variation.
  • Dynamic templates: Creative Automation streamlines tasks such as resizing, substituting, moving, and translating visual elements across different aspect ratios for all your audiences, products, etc.
  • Streamlined quality control processes: Generating and testing on-brand design variations is as easy as editing a spreadsheet, allowing marketers to overcome the back-and-forth with designers that come with scaling to all audiences.

Revolutionizing the digital ad world

GenAI has the potential to unleash digital marketers’ imagination and ultimately deliver ad experiences that are more relevant (and enjoyable) to consumers.

But for now, digital marketers need a creative translation layer to go from raw genAI output to on-brand experiences at scale. Platforms like Creative Automation can unlock immediate performance improvements across your ad landscape by harnessing – and channeling – the power of genAI today.

By Josh Dorward

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
In News

4 Social Media Strategies That Can Help Bring in 23 Percent More Profits

No Comments

By Linda Orr

Everything you need to know about effectively and efficiently targeting your audience through social media.

40 percent of the world’s population and 69 percent of Americans aged 18-29 are active users of social media. Social media has revolutionized how companies communicate with, listen to and learn from customers, much like TV advertising did in the 20th century.

A marketing strategy involves identifying a target market, establishing actions to reach that target market and continual analysis and adjustments. A social media strategy, on the other hand, educates engages, and excites your customers and builds brand loyalty. Excited and engaged customers bring in 23 percent more profits. Through video sharing sites customers can quasi-experience products as well, making a purchase more likely. Here are four areas of social media that all entrepreneurs should know.

1. The power of blogging and content marketing.

According to the book M: Marketing, 78 percent of customers prefer to get to know a company through articles rather than ads. Content marketing has six times higher conversion rates and has the potential for a 7.8-X boost in web traffic than other social media tools. In 2018, U.S. adults spent an average of 3 hours, 35 minutes per day on smartphones. Most of this time lends itself towards content marketing. For example, customers spend 11 percent of this time on personal productivity and finances. Customers want content marketing about personal finance management. They want to read it.

If you sell medical devices, you should have articles about any health issue surrounding the problem that your product solves. If you sell makeup, you should have how-to articles about makeup application and likely skin care guides. If you own a restaurant, provide information about food trends, dieting, or perhaps event planning.

To start a content campaign, figure out what your customers might care about and start writing. Local experts may be happy to provide articles because that is free social media advertising for them. Also, content marketing generated toward a political or charitable cause is impactful because 73 percent of all customers want to buy from companies that communicate upstanding moral philosophies.

2. Read and respond to reviews and complaints.

84 percent of customers trust online reviews. Ask your customers to review your company. You can manually check sites, like Google, or use reputation management software to track online comments and reviews. Respond to comments on social media rapidly! 53 percent of customers from all sites and 72 percent of Twitter customers expect a response in one hour, according to M: Marketing. Social media is now the number one place where customers want their complaints handled. No response or a template response are bad responses. Someone inside your company should personally address each complaint.

3. It’s not just about Facebook anymore.

All other social media channels should be used based on your specific target market. 68 percent of Americans use Facebook. Overall Facebook usage has been slowly declining and may be unprofessional. If you have a good webpage, there is no reason to have a Facebook page. It can confuse and overwhelm customers.  A local farmer’s market announces events, like strawberry picking dates, on different sites like Facebook and Twitter at different times. Confusion and added time searching turn customers away. 32 percent of Americans not on Facebook will give up as well. Stick with a robust homepage.

M: Marketing says that the average cost per click on a Facebook ad is $1.72. There is a 0.77 percent conversion rate on these clicks. That means that it costs $223.37 to gain a customer from Facebook plus the cost to create and manage the ad. You will likely not get a return on this investment although there are exceptions.

Two hundred sixty million people use LinkedIn each month; 40 percent daily. Use it for business-to-business content marketing! LinkedIn users prefer more word count per article than other sites. The most read articles, by more than a factor of three, were articles over 1,900 words. LinkedIn also has the highest conversion rate of all the sites. The lead to conversion rate is 2.74 percent versus Facebook (0.77 percent) and Twitter (0.69 percent).

Since Google bought YouTube, it shows up prominently in searches. Seventy-three percent of Americans use YouTube, the highest percentage of all social media forms. With video, you can engage emotion and excitement better. You can post a how-to and other useful videos. Even incredibly professional companies like the Cleveland Clinic use YouTube to demonstrate their innovations and accolades.

Dr. Dre launched “Beats by Dre” using social media. Instagram was influential in building brand awareness, attracting approximately 2.5 million followers. 35 percent of Americans use Instagram. Instagram, like YouTube, is a place to build excitement quickly.

Sites like Twitter and Pinterest have an audience of less than 35 percent of Americans. Pinterest is a great place to show home décor products and vacation pictures and would be helpful in those markets. Twitter can be a low investment place to respond to user comments rapidly.

Third-party bloggers are like a combination of content marketing and online reviews. Disney is famous for its use of Disney Moms. A group of 1,300 select moms receive perks, but not compensation, to visit and blog about their experiences. The moms talk about real issues, like dealing with food allergies or what to pack for a day in the park. Third party blogs are more credible and relatable.

4. Use data to learn, analyze and adapt.

An advantage of social media usage is the available data. You can use social media metrics to gauge attitudes, preferences, and trends. Available metrics are hits, page views, bounce rates, click paths, conversion rates and keyword analysis. There are numerous software packages available to examine each metric. Do not put too much weight on keyword optimization. Google regularly changes its search algorithms so sites should never be designed to game the Google system.

Use social media strategically. Make sure you know your target market. Use the tools to communicate in an engaging, informative, and caring way. Content marketing and responding to online reviews are the most important social media tools. Use the available metrics to revise your actions.

Feature Image Credit: jayk7 | Getty Images

By Linda Orr

Dr. Linda Orr is a Marketing Professor at the University of Akron. She has taught marketing and sales courses for over two decades and is the author of five books and many articles. Dr. Orr has experience in the record, restaurant and finance industries, along with numerous consulting experiences.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

Read More
By